Okay, this is a longer chapter...(and what I hope, it is a long and good chapter.) I had fun writing this one! ENJOY!
Chapter 10: From Fear to Hope
Jack shoved Tooth off the edge and she caught herself before she fell to the ground. He felt winter's magic surge through his staff; his mind was incredibly clear. Jack sent a surge of snow towards one of the sub-tunnels, hoping to find out who was there. He spotted the grey eyes as Hell blinked once, and then disappeared. Jack took a deep breath in fear as the eyes suddenly glowed from the tunnel right above him (a sub-tunnel to Hong Kong Island.) His eyes flashed, sparking dangerously and the staff of winter began to glimmer and glow, shining like a beacon of hope.
The boy of frost concentrated on one thing: Protect. And a wall of ice roared out of the Earth, stopping Bunny, Sandy, North and Tooth from helping him (Tooth had been shoved away by the wind.) The cerulean color in Jack Frost's eyes burned white. The South and East winds around him gently drifted toward the tunnels directly above Jack. Then Hell came into view with a whirlwind of sparks from the Hong Kong Island tunnel with waves of pain rolling off his finger tips. Hell not only could command any inferno, but also anything that could possibly make someone's life a literal hell. Jack almost doubled over as the wave of pain hit him and the light in his eyes faltered for a second, but he fought back regardless. He let the temperature drop steadily into the negatives and the wall of ice curved, encasing Hell and Jack inside a winter dome.
The other four Guardians couldn't even try to break the thick, blue ice. Even with swords, wings, sand whips and boomerangs. "JACK! Jack, let us in!" Bunny shouted, kicking the ice in frustration. Inside the dome, there appeared to be a series of red and white blasts of light. Then, out of the blue, it broke.
The ice barrier collapsed into a million little ice shards the glittered like many, many diamonds on the ground, revealing Jack Frost holding his staff like a sword to Hell's face. Hell had summoned four fire spirits but they had been frozen and frost still grew on them. Hell was melting any snow or ice that got close to him and Jack was fidgeting with the heat from the fires of Hell; fire and ice, being in close proximity to each other wasn't exactly comfortable.
The pieces of ice rose around them in columns when Hell fired a shadow at the Guardians of Childhood and Jack flicked his hand toward them. The ice shards, thousands of them, flew as one, meeting the darkness in mid-air and then the ice and shadow were no more than dust. The glow in Jack's eyes was mirrored in Hell's, whose eyes shone a deadly, steely grey. "Who. Are. You." Jack demanded. Hell rose into the air and with one point of his hand, his fire spirits unfroze instantly. Even Sandy felt unnerved by the power this stranger had. He had been around a long time, longer than the other Guardians, but he could not recall every meeting such a spirit as the one challenging them now.
"My name is Hell, and I'm here to make your life…just that." Hell stared at Bunny, then Jack. He held his right hand firmly out to his side as a hot, dry wind began to blow, whipping through his hair and ruffling the grass in waves. A burst of embers collected in Hell's hand, forming a trident. The trident blazed with ancient light, not good, not bad, simply power. It just depended on whose hands the trident was in. The blaze shifted from the trident's top and bottom like burning coals and at times the three tips of it would burst into flames. "It is, after all, what I do best." Hell whispered. His lips quirked up in a smile.
The trident swung so fast that the figure of it blurred as it cut through the air. It left three pencil-thin lines of red on Jack Frost's face, starting from his right temple to his left cheek. Jack raised a hand to his face as his fellow Guardians gasped behind him; the cuts were shallow but they burned with a hard, harsh fire. Before the burning from his face or Hell's fire could completely neutralize his power Jack threw a snowball at the Spirit of Hell (literally, his name tells all) as hard as he could. The snowball made Hell shoot backwards into the Scotland country sub-tunnel.
Jack Frost dropped to his knees on the burned, soaked earth with both hands over his cheek and forehead. His staff was on the ground beside him. "I will not cry out. I will not show how much it hurts. I will not give into to fear or pain. That is how I have lived for 300 years, and I will not do any different now." Jack Frost thought to himself, his conciousness reverting to the reptilian part of his brain, which unfortunately included the 'I am forever alone' mantra, embedded there from 300 years of solitude.
Filled with the strong urge to do nothing but end this where it stood, Tooth shot off into the Scottish tunnel without looking back. Sandy wasn't far behind her. North and Bunny combined forces, North occupying the four fire spirits (he later could not recall how) while Bunny raced to the dye river. Within a matter of seconds he had a small ditch running from the dye river, only seventeen feet away, into the valley and beside North. "North! Give 'em a bath!" Bunny shouted, running back to North as dye began to flow past him and pool at the end of the ditch. North, his beard smoking, stepped back into the ditch with no second thoughts about cloths etc. Two of the fire spirits followed North and as North had planned, they stepped into the dye pool as he leapt backward again (this time out of the dye) and ran away from them. The spirits weren't able to take being in something wet and both fell into the dye, melting like the Wicked Witch of the West (minus the green goo.) Bunny meanwhile, grabbed two sticks on the ground, using them to knock out and trip the other fire spirits into the dye pool where they disappeared into swirly colors.
Jack's glow stopped entirely and the ice, frost and snow retracted into him as he gripped the grass with hands that had blood on them. HIS blood on them. Blood that burned like ice, blood that felt like poison to his cool touch. "Jack!?" Bunny asked loudly, not taking the time to civilly walk to his friend's side and instead bounding hurriedly over with North right on his tail. Jack shook his head slightly with a small breath of air, and then turned his head away from them. "Jack…" North tried again, this time picking up the staff of Winter and holding it out for Jack. After a moment of hesitation, Jack took his staff in his left hand, his head inclining a little to just barely gaze at them. "It was the fire- my powers don't mix well with that. But he burned me with fire, so I burned him with ice."